8 Speakers Leading Discussions on Publishing and Content Creation at #SMWNYC

Everything we read, watch, and listen to online starts as an idea, and ends up as content. Some content performs better than others, but it seems like anyone and everyone is trying to throw their hat into the content and publishing ring.

At SMW New York, some of the leading publishers and content creators will join us to share their knowledge, learning, and experience with attendees. Click here to register your pass for SMW New York, and gain access to events and speakers that will dive deep into the current and future state of online content and digital publishing.

1. Stephanie Losee (Executive Director, Brand Content, Politico)

Tuesday, Feb. 23 • 2:30PM • TimesCenter (FWD Stage)
When it comes to brands creating engaging content, the stakes have never been higher. The growth in programmatic and in ad blockers means that content needs to be at Hollywood-scale and cost half the price, which forces brands, agencies and publishers to prove that the level of investment in content is worth it. Along with Stephanie, hear from Brian Becker (Executive Director, Head of Newsroom, JPMorgan Chase), Shareen Pathak (Brands Editor, Digiday), and Jinal Shah (Digital Strategy Director, JWT New York).

2. Joyann King (Editor, HarpersBazaar.com)

Tuesday, Feb. 23 • 3:30PM • TimesCenter (FWD Stage)
Joyann will speak on this panel to explore how large scale increases in social followings are achieved, and compare the effectiveness of two differing social strategies: the use of performance metrics and audience data to inform social content, and following gut instinct to create posts that resonate with audiences. Kate Lewis (VP, Content Operations & Editorial Director, Hearst Digital), will moderate this session.

3. Summer Anne Burton (Editorial Director, Distributed, BuzzFeed)

Wednesday, Feb. 24 • 11:00AM • SVA Theatre (EDU Stage)
In this interactive presentation, BuzzFeed social experts Rachel Christensen and Summer Anne Burton will discuss how they helped successfully build the largest social networks in media by rethinking the way the industry sees social media editors, content, and distribution. They’ll cover how BuzzFeed stuck to scrappy and unconventional ways of thinking, and how they used data to inform their strategies.

4. Chris Berend (Vice President for Video Development, CNN)

Thursday, Feb. 25 • 9:00AM • SVA Theatre (EDU Stage)
Learn how to build a content strategy that’s informed by data from your social media properties. Plus, find out secrets to harness that data for audience targeting, distribution and more. Berend brings a wealth of experience to Great Big Story, a socially-distributed video network that covers real stories, where he oversees strategy and day-to-day operations from editorial to product and audience development.


More at SMW New York: 5 Events At #SMWNYC On How To Engage Gen-Y And Gen-Z On Social Media


5. Emily Bazelon (Staff Writer, The New York Times Magazine)

Thursday, Feb. 25 • 11:30AM • TimesCenter (FWD Stage)
In 2008, the political news cycle moved to the blogs, and in 2012 it spilled into social media but remained mostly intact as an insular conversation among journalists and opinion-shapers. In 2016, it’s being disrupted by candidates, trolls, and everyone in between. Hear from Emily Bazelon as she joins this session hosted by Blue State Digital. Also on this session is Garance Franke-Ruta (Editor in Chief, Yahoo Politics, Yahoo News).

6. Neal Mann (Editor, The Wall Street Journal)

Thursday, Feb. 25 • 4:30PM • TimesCenter (FWD Stage)
Will data be the new Editor-in-Chief? With the rise of machine learning and the availability of data, both publishers and platforms rely on algorithms, analytics and data modeling to personalize content to no end. A reader’s interaction with content becomes part of an optimization equation, based on preferences, actions taken online and the communities they belong to. Is this a good thing? Does journalism suffer without a human touch? Neal Mann will answer these questions and more during this session.

7. Philippe von Borries (Co-Founder and Co-CEO , Refinery29)

Friday, Feb. 26 • 9:30AM • TimesCenter (FWD Stage)
Through the rise of social networks and smartphones, the millennial ideology has transformed communication, making instantaneous, raw, and constant contact the norm. Philippe von Borries, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of lifestyle media company Refinery29, will discuss the advantages and challenges that this new landscape presents using concrete examples of how Refinery29 is capitalizing on this moment through its recent global expansion.

8. Eric Alt (Editor of CoCreate, Fast Company)

Friday, Feb. 26 • 1:00PM • SVA Theatre (EDU Stage)
Eric Alt will participate in a session to discuss why designers, writers, photographers and video producers need to think about execution and ideas informed by data on how to better speak to our audiences. Content creators are reducing subjectivity in favor of new ways of working by bringing creative, strategy, account and paid media teams closer than ever, all through insights and numbers.

#eprdctn – Digital Publishing Professionals Collaborate on Twitter

Creating digital books takes a fair amount of knowhow and patience: ebook developers have CSS and HTML skills, and they put in long hours designing, coding, testing, and running quality assurance checks on each title that they build.

It’s a specialized — and potentially lonely — niche in publishing, not unlike copyediting, in its level of nuance and behind-the-scenes mystique. Some publishers and content creation teams employ a number of developers in-house. But many industry professionals work on teams of experts in related fields or remotely as independent consultants and are, in essence, isolated from their eProduction peers.

Along with that comes the challenge of a swiftly evolving digital publishing world, where there are frequent software updates, numerous tweaks to vendor specifications, and each new device launch means new rules and new creative opportunities for developers.

Hashtag Community

hashtagFortunately social media, and the #eprdctn hashtag, make it possible for eProduction pros to keep up with those changes, stay current, stay connected, and stay sane while working independently. “#eprdctn is a large community of ebook developers who discuss technical aspects of their day-to-day work. We share advice and resources as we find ways of improving workflows,” explains Iris Amelia Febres, an Ebook Developer at F+W Media who also teaches electronic publishing for Emerson College.

#eprdctn is a community that “is most often [engaged in] a loose conversation about current issues. Once in a while we…have a ‘dumb question amnesty,’ during which time anyone can post any question — no matter how simple — to #eprdctn and get an answer from an industry leader. These are always very popular,” notes Laura Brady, Ebook Developer and Principal at Brady Type and an occasional leader of the #eprdctn group.

Flocking To Twitter

In 2011, Lindsay Martin started the group by contacting professional in the field who already used Twitter to share insights and encouraging them to include the hashtag with their posts, explains Ebook Developer Colleen Cunningham (@BookDesignGirl).

A valuable group of established experts, regulars, lurkers and drop-ins, “the #eprdctn community on Twitter is far and away my favourite co-worker. These people lighten my load with humour, tech support, news and information, and collaboration,” says Brady. Beginners are always welcome, according to Febres, who describes the community as both “a job board and a Q&A session.

Twitter makes it all possible. Some people have tried extending the group “to other social media platforms but Twitter seems to work the best because, there, it’s truly organic and of-the-moment. No moderators are necessary,” notes Cunningham. #eprdctn hosts a nicely structured hour-long weekly chat too; a “roundtable discussion, where it’s a bit of a free-for-all in terms of what to talk about. Sometimes major events of the week will form the session [or] guests lead talks and people will ask them questions,” says Febres. You can join the conversation each Wednesday at 11:00 am EST.

In Real Life

#eprdctn comes together in person, too! Febres organizes a casual meet-up of developers as time allows and points out that the community also tries to “get together if we’re attending a conference, like Digital Book World. It’s great to have that face-to-face time to connect with colleagues on a personal level. We trade stories and tips, network, and just have a good time. It’s part networking, part therapy. Making ebooks can be tough!”

Women’s Workforce

The group is doing work, beyond the day-to-day tasks at hand, by empowering women in tech to continue making great strides in the field of eProduction. “Ebook development seems to be a good gender mix, the leaders in the field are also a healthy mix. In fact, there are so many whip-smart women in this tech-focused space that it makes me a hopeful feminist ebook developer. The most outspoken members continue to be men but that is certainly shifting,” says Brady who strives “to mentor women trying to find work in ebooks.” And who, in planning the ebookcraft conference, “managed to get about 60% female speakers.”

Febres agrees that gender parity is important in the world of ebook production: “There’s a pocket of us female developers….we complain and challenge and wonder [and] we can be pretty vocal about it. I always try to share different ‘pro-women in tech’ networking events and resources, like the monthly Boston Girl Geek Dinner.”

You Can Too

As talented women-in-tech in their own right, Febres and Brady share a few suggestions about how you can launch your own social media lab-style community:

  1. Pick a day and time.
  2. Be consistent with your meetings.
  3. Posit questions to the group and share links.
  4. Invite others to participate.
  5. Have a hashtag!

Regularly scheduled chats can quickly turn into an anytime resource network. “Think of building a community as a collaborative tool, not a community with leaders and followers… #eprdctn is not a place to say and tell. It is where you go to figure out, to help, to ask for [help] and to find fellow travellers,” advises Brady.

Does your industry host useful social media conversations? Share your wisdom and community hashtags in the comments. Then, make sure you check out these related events this SMW14!


Deanna Utroske is the Social Media Brand Director for New York Women in Communications and writes on women’s career issues, lifestyle topics and more. Follow her on Twitter @DeannaUtroske.

The Role of Social Media for Libraries, Part II

I first encountered Heather Backman while tweeting about my personal experience with the Howe Library. Heather is the Programming, Public Relations and Outreach Coordinator for Howe Library in Hanover, NH. She was hired by Howe in October 2010 and part of her job entails handling the library’s publicity and social media outreach activities. Prior to her arrival at Howe, she earned a B.A. and M.A. in English literature from Stanford University and a M.S. in Information from the University of Michigan. She blogs– and you should read it. Catch the first segment of my interview with Heather here.

She discusses here how technology such as e-books affected the library.

In one sense, e-books have changed very little about what libraries do or how we do it; they just allow us to deliver a basic library service in a different medium. Some people have said that e-books are “killing” the printed book or that they spell the end of libraries, but that hasn’t been my experience. To my mind, the e-book is not “killing” the printed book, just supplementing it. We are still buying physical books in large quantities and I expect that we will continue to do so for a long time. I would go so far as to say that I doubt the physical book will ever completely go away. Even if it does, libraries are more about information-sharing than about lending physical items; handling e-books may mean changes in some of our procedures but I don’t think that libraries will cease to exist when the e-book predominates.

E-books have, however, also been what I’ve seen people refer to as a “disruptive influence.” This doesn’t mean that their impact has been negative, but just that they’ve shaken things up in the library world, in both good ways and bad.

E-books have created a whole new area of demand for libraries. In many ways this has been a boon because it has enabled us to provide technologically up-to-date services to a segment of the population who may not have used libraries before. It’s great for customer relations when we can offer people a service that they want but may not expect to find at a library – and it’s clear that people want e-book lending and troubleshooting assistance. Currently, we offer e-books and audiobooks for download via a service called Overdrive, which we subscribe to as part of a statewide consortium. It is used almost to the point of straining the system; most of the books are checked out at any given time, and we get very frequent questions on how to use the service. We offered a class on using Overdrive as a test for patron interest and had 40 in attendance, which is pretty good for this kind of program at Howe Library.

The popularity of e-book lending also raises some complex questions for libraries. For instance, it necessitates that we reconsider how we allocate our budgets. How much should we take away from book purchases to fund e-book purchases? This is tricky because there are at least as many of our patrons who still don’t use e-readers as there are patrons who are enthusiastic e-book readers. Physical books work for everyone; e-books are only usable for a specific segment of our user base. The issue becomes especially difficult because we can’t always get the same books in physical and electronic format. As of this writing, out of the “big six” publishers (Random House, HarperCollins, Penguin, Hachette, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster) only Random House allows libraries to lend e-books with no restrictions (learn more here). HarperCollins will sell e-books to libraries but requires us to re-purchase a book after it has been lent 26 times. Penguin recently announced that it would not be selling any new titles to libraries, and for a while, older Penguin titles that we had already purchased were unavailable for lending. (Actually, between the time I wrote that sentence and the time I’m editing it, they announced that they are pulling out of Overdrive altogether. A good basic summary of the situation is here.). Hachette, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster also won’t sell to us. This aspect of the situation is, to put it mildly, frustrating. We want to give our patrons what they’re asking for but in many cases we just can’t. For instance, if you want to read the new Steve Jobs biography, which is published by Simon & Schuster, you’re stuck with the paper format if you want to get it from a library and/or if you don’t have the money to buy the e-book yourself.

Amazon adds even more complexity. For a long time, the company would not make Kindles compatible with Overdrive. It was a big deal when they finally decided to allow library lending of Kindle books, but the launch of that functionality was very quickly overshadowed by Amazon’s launch of its own separate Kindle lending program. And Amazon’s involvement is exacerbating the issues with other publishers. Amazon is radically changing the face of publishing in ways that are not necessarily beneficial for the publishing ecosystem. Now it’s launched its own publishing house, making it a competitor with other publishers at the same time as it is a vital distributor for them. I think that this makes the publishing houses even warier of participating in anything Amazon is involved with, and that includes library e-book lending.

Librarians and publishers are at least trying to talk to each other but it doesn’t seem as though much progress is being made yet. With the most recent news from Penguin, it’s hard to be optimistic right now. Although publishers have legitimate concerns about how they are going to make money in the world of e-books, I honestly believe that they are shooting themselves in the foot by not working with libraries, and causing a good deal of collateral damage in the process. It’s frustrating to see libraries get bad PR (“I can’t get such-and-such e-book from my local library” can feed into stronger perceptions of public libraries as obsolescent in the Internet age) due to factors out of their control.

On the other hand, there are rays of light. Many patrons are impressed that they can get e-books from their local library at all; it does help us to show that we are more “with the times” than some people who haven’t set foot in a library for years might expect. And we are evidently still able to provide reading material that our patrons want and enjoy, judging by the heavy use of the e-books that we are able to lend.

Lisa Chau has been involved  with Web 2.0 since graduate school at Dartmouth College, where she completed an independent study on blogging. She was subsequently highlighted as a woman blogger in Wellesley Magazine, published by her alma mater. Since 2009, Lisa has worked as an Assistant Director at the Tuck School of Business. In 2012, she launched GothamGreen212 to pursue social media strategy projects. You can follow her on Twitter.

Interview with Stephen Duncombe, SMWNYC Panelist for Literature Unbound

Stephen Duncombe is an Associate Professor at the Gallatin School and the Department of Media, Culture and Communications of New York University where he teaches the history and politics of media. He is the author of Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy and Notes From Underground: Zines and the Politics of Underground Culture; co-author of The Bobbed Haired Bandit: Crime and Celebrity in 1920s New York; editor of the Cultural Resistance Reader and co-editor of White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race.  He writes on the intersection of culture and politics for a range of scholarly and popular publications, from the cerebral The Nation, to the prurient Playboy.

Stephen will speak at Literature Unbound: Radical Strategies for Social Literature at NYU during Social Media Week. I interviewed Stephen to learn more about his work and experiences.

What are the best ways for political activists to harness social media’s value?

There’s the obvious ways: using social media as a way to communicate better than we’ve been able todo before, reaching more people, with more information, faster, easier and cheaper. But what excites me most about the power of social media in activism is less how it is being used as a instrumental tool and more how it is had been integrated into on-the ground activist practice as a sort of social protocol. The organization of social media — distributed, participatory, individualized within the context of a collectivity — is being mirrored on the streets in the very social forms of the protests that are taking place: the largely leader-less, horizontally-organized, mass occupations of public space that are sweeping the world. Back in the 1960s the great critic Lionel Trilling called the demonstrations that were happening “Modernism in the Streets.” I think we could call what is happening around the world today “Internet in the Streets.”

Can you explain the ramifications that recent political uprisings aided by social media channels have had on the social media landscape as a whole, and particularly where restrictive governments reign?

I think the simplest answer to this is that restrictive governments have a hard time reigning-in Twitter and Facebook. They can try, and sometimes they succeed. Some governments, like China, are very good at these restrictions, but repressive governments are caught in a fundamental bind. The very tools of communications and networking that are essential for economic innovations and the wealth of the nation, can be — and are — also used for political innovations as well.

What is social literature?

This is what we’ll find out on February 14! Literature has always been social, that is: it’s a communication between an author and a reader. The development of print greatly expanded the range of this relationship — a writer in India could reach a reader in Canada, but it also restricted the sociality into a one-way communications: the author writes and the reader reads. With the digital revolution all this has changed. Since every digital device is both a receiver and a transmitter, the flow of communications can go both ways and, because these devices are networked, this conversation can be opened up to many others.

You created the Open Utopia, an open-access, open-source, web-based edition of Thomas More’s Utopia. What inspired this project?

A few years back I had the privilege of teaching a Fulbright seminar at Moscow State University on the topic of “political imagination.” In preparation for doing this, I re-read Thomas More’s 16th century classic Utopia. But when I did this I read a completely different book that what I had remembered reading in High School. This time I realized that what More was creating was less a authoritative plan of an alternative society and more an “imaginal machine” — a technology for stimulating the imagination of his readers. How he does this would take a long time to explain, but simply put, by creating an alternative world that he then names No-Place (which is what Utopia means in Greek), more pushes his readers to imagine what an alternative some-place might look like for themselves.

But More was stuck with the technology of his day: the printed page, and so his readers had to do all their imaginative work in their heads and as individuals. By creating an open-access, open-source, web-based edition of Thomas More’s Utopia, I’ve tried to “Open” up the book to the reader’s active participation. In my digital edition of Utopia readers become writers and editors and collaborators.  One of the ways they can do this is WikiTopia–a mediawiki on which people can draft their own ideal society, or collaborate with others in creating a collectively authored Utopia. And with a platform designed by the folks at the Institute for the Future of the Book called “Social Book,” visitors to Open Utopia can annotate and comment upon what More – or I – have written, and then share their comments with others. The idea here is to help people to imagine their own Utopias and share them with others, and not be content with an “authorized” Utopia, be it More’s or anyone else’s.

In what [other] ways does the internet honor the primary precept of Utopia — that is, that all property is common property?

I’ve always thought that it was ironic that a book about the abolition of private property was locked up in copyright. So in my mission to open up Utopia, I’ve created the only complete Creative Commons licenced English language edition of Utopia.  Most of the text I’ve taken from old translations that have passed into the public domain, but some of the letters I had newly translated from the original Latin into English specifically so I could enter them into the public domain.

Do you have any plans of giving another book the same treatment?

I don’t think so.  One of the great luxuries of my job as a tenured professor is I get to study and experiment…and then move on to study and experiment something else. But I do think some of the features of the Open Utopia — the rich media, the ability for readers to become writers, the shared annotations, the lack of a restrictive copyright — are going to be part of any and all books that we all “write” and “read” in this coming century.

With funding from the Open Societies Foundations, you co-created the School for Creative Activism in 2011, and you are presently Co-Director of the Center for Artistic Activism.  What are some of the projects you’ve been working on?

When I’m not mired deep in a historical text about Utopia, I’m trying to figure out ways in the present to create an alternative society for the future. The work we do at the Center for Artistic Activism and the School for Creative Activism is very much a part of this. We think activism is, or rather its should be, an art: it should be creative and it should be inspirational. So we work with grass-roots organizers to bring an artistic eye and a creative hand to their tactics, their strategies and their goal setting. We think you need to do this to be an effective activist in the 21st century. The first rule of guerrilla warfare is to know your terrain and use it to your advantage. Today’s political topography includes signs and symbols, stories ans spectacle, and an activist needs the creative weapons to fight on this terrain. But creativity in activism is also important for another reason: we have to be able to imagine a better world if we want to have any hope of changing this one.

 

Lisa Chau has been involved with Web 2.0 since graduate school at Dartmouth College, where she completed an independent study on blogging. She was subsequently highlighted as a woman blogger in Wellesley Magazine, published by her alma mater. Since 2009, Lisa has worked as an Assistant Director at the Tuck School of Business. In 2012, she launched GothamGreen212 to pursue social media strategy projects. You can follow her on twitter.

Art & Culture A Fit For Hearst

One of the ways SMW NYC helps attendees follow events easily is by segmenting the events into different Content Hubs. This content is hosted by iconic institutions, leaders in the area. And one of those is Hearst Magazines. Stimulating dialogue centered around the arts, fashion and cultural shifts, Hearst Magazines will serve as our Art & Culture Hub. We chatted with David Carey, President of Hearst Magazines, to give you a peek at what to expect at this vibrant hub.

This isn’t Hearst’s first time serving as a Hub for SMW NYC. How did Hearst first get involved?
The folks at Social Media Week approached us to host the Art & Culture hub in 2011, and we jumped at the opportunity to get involved in this initiative, particularly since social media has become so integral to what we do here at Hearst. We were thrilled to showcase our position as a leader in the digital space and there was no question we were going to participate again this year.

 
Our global theme for SMW12 is “Empowering Change through Collaboration.” How does Hearst support this?
Hearst has always been about collaboration. We’re known for being a great partner, whether it’s through our partnership with MSN on top-10 food site Delish.com, with Scripps Interactive on Food Network Magazine or with Amazon on e-commerce initiatives. We’ll also see more collaboration within the organization, between digital and print, across our brands domestically and with our international editions. Hearst is a global company and our employees can and do share ideas and best practices around the world.

 
What major trends are you seeing in the publishing space with digital?
We are bullish on the tablet and e-reader space and expect that as it grows to scale, there will be a huge upside for magazine publishers to create new and additional revenue streams for consumers to get paid content that we don’t feel is going to replace or duplicate our print business. We’ve sold 450,000 digital subscriptions to date and hope to reach 1 million by end of year. Digital editions also enable us to create a more social and interactive experience for our readers.

We are also very focused on the area of e-commerce. Magazines have traditionally been a gateway to purchase for our retail partners so we are now looking at ways to benefit from that influence by striking e-commerce partnerships to promote our brand expertise and drive revenue share opportunities. Recently we’ve made an investment in-home design site Dering Hall, with whom we also have an editorial partnership with ELLE Decor, House Beautiful and VERANDA; with Amazon on e-commerce initiatives; and, even globally, where Elle.com Japan is an e-commerce site.

This February, Hearst is serving as the Art & Culture Hub throughout the week. What can SMW NYC attendees expect to see from the Art & Culture Hub?
We have a great, engaging lineup of programming happening in Hearst Tower that week– including a Tweet-off between comedians, a panel on the influence of street style blogs, a conversation about the “new ghostwriter” on social media, and a keynote Q&A with music artist/entrepreneur Jermaine Dupri and our very own Adam Lavelle, chief strategy officer of iCrossing, the digital marketing agency Hearst acquired in 2010. I’m personally very excited to attend some of these sessions and learn from them.

 
Why Art & Culture at Hearst?
Our brands at Hearst fit in very well with the Art & Culture theme, as we cover subjects ranging from fashion and home to politics and pop culture across our magazine and digital portfolio. We have our finger on the pulse of what’s being talked about — the latest trends, technologies and cultural touchpoints, so it’s only natural that we would host this hub.

 
Hearst is pulling together some phenomenal events for the week. What event should attendees not miss but might not be on their radar quite yet?
In collaboration with the folks at Social Media Week, we’re pulling together some fantastic keynotes throughout the week and we’re also hosting the opening press conference on February 9 to kickoff this year’s festivities. We’re proud to be able to host the conference at Hearst Tower for the second consecutive year and hope that the attendees throughout Social Media Week will enjoy a fun, insightful roster of programming.

 
A big thanks to David for taking the time to speak with us. And you can see the full lineup of events at the Art & Culture Hub here, and make sure to keep up with the major speakers at this location on Twitter with our Art & Culture Hub list and by using #SMWHearst.

Hub Spotlight: Business, Media & Communications, hosted by JWT New York

Following previous posts regarding the People & Society and Science & Technology Hubs, today we would like to share details about the Business, Media & Communications Hub, which is hosted by Social Media Week’s global sponsor JWT at their headquarters here in New York.

JWT is one of the world’s best-known marketing communications brands. Headquartered in New York, JWT is a true global network with more than 200 offices in over 90 countries employing nearly 10,000 marketing professionals.

JWT consistently ranks among the top agency networks in the world and continues its dominant presence in the industry by staying on the leading edge—from producing the first-ever TV commercial in 1939 to developing award-winning branded content for brands such as Bloomberg, Ford and HSBC.

Social Media Week is proud to be working with JWT and excited to also partner with their London, Toronto & São Paulo offices.

GET INVOLVED IN BUSINESS, MEDIA & COMMUNICATIONS

The Business, Media & Communications Hub will focus on everything advertising, marketing, publishing and enterprise related and will bring together some of the leading individuals and companies who are helping to shape the future of communications. Confirmed speakers include:  John Winsor, CEO of Victor & Spoils, David Eastman, CEO North America, Worldwide Digital Director, JWT, Benjamin Palmer, CEO/CCO of the Barbarian Group, Faris Yakob, Chief Innovation Officer, MDC/kbs+p.

Themes & topics covered will include:

  • Social production & mass collaboration
  • The future agency
  • Engaging the audience in publishing
  • Social commerce
  • Brands as storytellers
  • Branded entertainment
  • Humanizing brands
  • Data, analytics, and insight
  • Utilizing the social graph

This list is by no means comprehensive, but it provides a flavor of some of areas we will be covering.  The agenda will be released in January, however if you would like to suggest themes and topics that we should be covering, please let us know.

If you or your organization is interested in curating a session and helping to shape the programming at the Business, Media & Communications Hub we would love to hear from you.  Sessions are typically two hours in length and can include a series of talks, a panel, a workshop or seminar.  We encourage our guest curators to think creatively about their sessions and consider designing an experience that moves beyond traditional conference formats.

To submit a session idea, please visit the event registration page and reference which Hub you are interested in, in your application.

If you are interested in sponsorship or media partnership opportunities, we have some really exciting ways for brands to participate  in the experience and contribute to the programming. For more information please contact: toby@socialmediaweek.org

The Business, Media & Communications Hub is brought to you by Social Media Week organizers Crowdcentric & host sponsor JWT.

About the Hubs

Social Media Week Hubs include: Science and Technology Hub, hosted by Google; Business, Media, and Communications Hub, hosted by global advertising agency JWT; People & Society Hub, hosted by The Paley Center for Media; and Music, Gaming & Sports, hosted by Red Bull Space. As we mentioned in our announcement, we are also launching a fifth Hub which will cover Arts & Culture, the location of which we will share in the coming week or so.